Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics.
Speaker 1: Well we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds.
Speaker 2: We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have
Speaker 2: a great show for you today. David Wallace Well stops
Speaker 2: by updatus on what he's seeing on the climate change front.
Speaker 2: But first we have the author of Fluke, Chance, Chaos
Speaker 2: and why everything we do matters, Brian Klass.
Speaker 3: Welcome too, Fast Politics.
Speaker 4: Brian, it's so great to be back.
Speaker 3: You're in the UK.
Speaker 1: I think we must first do two seconds on the UK,
Speaker 1: despite its complete lack of importance in the world, no
Speaker 1: offense or anything, talk to us about what's going on there. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I'm a dual national now, so I get to
Speaker 4: vote in both the UK and the US elections.
Speaker 3: Is that photo fraud? That feels like photo fraud? Now?
Speaker 4: I endeavor to do a bye by the rules since
Speaker 4: I once sorte a book called how to regular Election,
Speaker 4: I have to be sort of careful about that.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 4: But the thing that's interesting about the UK, it's going
Speaker 4: to be an electoral landslide for the Labor Party, the
Speaker 4: last wing party, And what's really striking here is that
Speaker 4: when you screw up a country and when you sort
Speaker 4: of fail to govern, people actually change their minds. And
Speaker 4: so what you see here is that the Tory base,
Speaker 4: the Conservative Party base, has sort of fallen out. I mean,
Speaker 4: they're pulling somewhere between seventeen and twenty four percent in
Speaker 4: most of the polls, and they won forty six percent
Speaker 4: of the votes in the last election, so they've lost
Speaker 4: half their vote. And I think this is the thing
Speaker 4: that makes me the most depressed about the United States
Speaker 4: is that, by contrast, you can have all the stuff
Speaker 4: with Trump, you know, thirty four felonies, all the craziness
Speaker 4: and all the failures of governance, and he's just at
Speaker 4: forty percent always. And I think that's something that speaks
Speaker 4: to you know, a rareer statement these days. But the
Speaker 4: comparative health actually of British democracy is that when you
Speaker 4: wreck the country, there are still electoral consequences here.
Speaker 1: Okay, so I'm going to just push back here, and
Speaker 1: I hate to push back, but you guys are a
Speaker 1: coalition government. I mean, if we were in a coalition government,
Speaker 1: I think we'd be in a totally different place.
Speaker 4: That's true, But really there are are two main viable
Speaker 4: parties in most UK elections. And I think the other
Speaker 4: thing it's worth remembering is that this is something where
Speaker 4: the Conservative Party has collapsed. It's not something where you have,
Speaker 4: you know, a situation where it's all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: you know, there's different coalitions. It's that they've actually lost
Speaker 4: half their voters. So in other words, they got forty
Speaker 4: six percent last time around, they're probably going to get
Speaker 4: like twenty percent this time around. Whereas you know, you're
Speaker 4: not seeing that sort of shift in the US, especially
Speaker 4: even among favorability ratings for Trump, right, So like if
Speaker 4: you ask people like do you think the Conservatives are good,
Speaker 4: those ratings have also collapsed, Whereas if you ask people
Speaker 4: do you think Trump is good, they're pretty flat. And
Speaker 4: so you know, that's that's the thing again. I mean
Speaker 4: Liz Trust was the other instance of this, where she's
Speaker 4: completely bankrupted the country, messed the economy up in a
Speaker 4: catastrophic way, you know, famously failed to outlive a lettuce
Speaker 4: and so on. She had a nine percent approval rating
Speaker 4: in the only poll that was taken, because she was
Speaker 4: only in power long enough to have one poll taken,
Speaker 4: but it was you know, unbelievably unpopular, and that meant
Speaker 4: that her own party had turned on her. And I
Speaker 4: think that's what's really striking to me as an American
Speaker 4: living in the UK and now a naturalized British citizen
Speaker 4: as well, is that they are still capable of turning
Speaker 4: on their own party.
Speaker 3: They're not as partisan as Americans.
Speaker 4: Well, I think there's just more of a willingness to
Speaker 4: sort of jettison a politician when they objectively screw up.
Speaker 4: And I mean, you know, the last sort of fourteen
Speaker 4: years of Britain has been one of decline, and so
Speaker 4: people are fed up and they're actually changing their minds
Speaker 4: and changing their votes.
Speaker 1: I both agree and disagree here, Like I do think
Speaker 1: that one of Trump's superpowers is that he's very charismatic,
Speaker 1: which is Boris Johnson was. I don't want to sound
Speaker 1: like a snob here, but Boris Johnson was like maybe
Speaker 1: a little too intelligent, even though again I feel like
Speaker 1: I'm going to get roasted for saying this, but like
Speaker 1: he was. I mean, Boris Johnson compared to Trump.
Speaker 3: As like Lincoln. I mean, am I wrong?
Speaker 1: I mean, his policies are terrible, He's completely crazy, but
Speaker 1: I think he is a little less crazy than Trump
Speaker 1: and a little more posh.
Speaker 4: I think that's true, But I also think that the
Speaker 4: UK electorate would never go for a Trump figure. I mean,
Speaker 4: Boris is as close to that that you could possibly get,
Speaker 4: because for sure, I mean over here universally, the conversations
Speaker 4: that Americans have with British people about US politics is
Speaker 4: what is happening? How can you possibly still be flirting
Speaker 4: with Trump for a second term. There's just a bafflement, right,
Speaker 4: There's this sort of can you please explain to me
Speaker 4: how this person still is in politics, because you know,
Speaker 4: there are consequences for scandals in UK politics, even though
Speaker 4: there's still scandals, right. It's not like they're politicians who
Speaker 4: are free from scandal. It's just that they actually have
Speaker 4: consequences and they destroy careers still and they have you know,
Speaker 4: sort of inquiries from nonpartisan groups that condemn them, and
Speaker 4: then they leave politics and shame still exists Boris notwithstanding.
Speaker 4: It's one of the things where whenever I tell people,
Speaker 4: you know, that I've become a naturalized British citizen, they
Speaker 4: always say, you know, commiserations, you've left one sinking ship
Speaker 4: for another, you know, But I do think that the
Speaker 4: UK is sinking less, and I think part of that
Speaker 4: is because of what's about to happen on July fourth,
Speaker 4: which is the UK elections, where there is going to
Speaker 4: be a I mean, I think this will be a
Speaker 4: complete sea change election. I mean we could have one
Speaker 4: of the biggest wipeouts of Conservative politicians in living memory,
Speaker 4: possibly more than from nineteen ninety seven when Tony Blair
Speaker 4: rose to power. To me, this is really indicative of
Speaker 4: complete collapse, is that they're like the person who's the
Speaker 4: chancellor right now, Jeremy Hunt could lose his seat right
Speaker 4: he's like the second in command basically for the party
Speaker 4: and he's fighting to maintain his position in Parliament. There
Speaker 4: are going to be a lot of senior politicians who
Speaker 4: are ousted from politics altogether in this election, which is
Speaker 4: not going to happen in the United States come November.
Speaker 4: So I think there's some stuff for his glimmers of hope.
Speaker 3: In the UK.
Speaker 1: Every election since twenty sixteen, Trump has lost. So even
Speaker 1: though the polls make it look tight, make it seem tight,
Speaker 1: they're polling this elector we don't know if that going
Speaker 1: to show up or not. Largely Republicans have not really
Speaker 1: won since twenty sixteen, and even when they won the House,
Speaker 1: it was sort of this Ron Lauder sneak in these
Speaker 1: five Republicans in California and in New York State that
Speaker 1: they might be real moderates and not vote for stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about d Esposito and Mike Lawler and a
Speaker 1: bunch of white guys who seem like they might not
Speaker 1: be so bad. So even if the polls say one thing,
Speaker 1: and maybe these polls are correct and maybe we have
Speaker 1: this trumpy election in twenty twenty four that makes us
Speaker 1: all eat our hats. But if you were to just
Speaker 1: look at elections, every single special election since the fall
Speaker 1: of Row has been a fucking shit show for Republicans.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I get that, But the thing is
Speaker 4: that there's not been like an electoral blood bass for
Speaker 4: Republicans ever. And like, this is something where we're talking
Speaker 4: the Tories. So there's six hundred and fifty seats in
Speaker 4: the British Parliament and there's a question about whether the
Speaker 4: Tories going to win one hundred, right, I mean, this
Speaker 4: is the kind of stuff we're talking about.
Speaker 1: But they've been in power for almost twenty years. I mean,
Speaker 1: they left the European Union. Like Trump is a fucking
Speaker 1: moron and a lunatic, But the damage that has happened
Speaker 1: with leaving the EU is harder to effects than Trump.
Speaker 5: Well, I don't think I agree with that.
Speaker 1: Do you think they could go back into the EU
Speaker 1: or you think it's not as damaging.
Speaker 4: I don't think that the damage is more severe than
Speaker 4: Trump is doing to say American democracy and so on.
Speaker 4: I think the problems that Trump is injected into the
Speaker 4: US political bloodstream are generational. One way that I think
Speaker 4: is worth thinking about with the UK versus the US
Speaker 4: is that I think the UK is basically a broken
Speaker 4: economy with a functioning society and political system, and I
Speaker 4: think the US is the opposite. The US is a
Speaker 4: functioning economy with a broken society and political system. You know,
Speaker 4: And I think basically, you know, economics can be fixed.
Speaker 4: I mean, obviously leaving the EU as a catastrophic disaster,
Speaker 4: but you know there's going to be over time closer
Speaker 4: regulatory alignment, and they're going to try to get the
Speaker 4: trade policy closer and closer to what it was in
Speaker 4: the EU. Won't be the same, it will still do
Speaker 4: mass damage. But I mean, like social trust still exists
Speaker 4: to a pretty high degree here.
Speaker 3: Right, that's true.
Speaker 4: And on top of that, you know, I mean it
Speaker 4: was just it was really indicative to go through the
Speaker 4: pandemic and then go to the US because you know,
Speaker 4: like the guy who is the version of Anthony Fauci
Speaker 4: here and then and Chris Whitty, like he's like a celebrity,
Speaker 4: he's like a hero, and like Anthony Fauci has to
Speaker 4: walk around with like, you know, protection because people are
Speaker 4: trying to murder him because they think he concocted COVID,
Speaker 4: and so like this is the kind of stuff where
Speaker 4: you just see like mirror images where there's just like
Speaker 4: a generally functioning society based in reality. And I'm not
Speaker 4: I'm not trying to whitewash the UK's problems. It's got
Speaker 4: serious political problems. But like because the BBC is the
Speaker 4: main source of news for people, which like sixty percent
Speaker 4: of people get their news from the BBC, the debates
Speaker 4: start from the perspective of like here's how the world is.
Speaker 3: A shared reality.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like what should we do about it? Whereas like
Speaker 4: when I talk to people about US politics, like you
Speaker 4: start to talk to a Trump supporter and you just
Speaker 4: don't agree on basic principles like who is the president
Speaker 4: who won the election? Right? Like is COVID real? Like
Speaker 4: these are problems that are just so fundamentally different, I
Speaker 4: think in terms of the scale of the debate, and
Speaker 4: also I think the state of the media as well.
Speaker 4: I mean, the ways that politicians get held to account
Speaker 4: in the British press is savage and it's something that
Speaker 4: we do not do as well in the United States.
Speaker 1: No, no question, and we can definitely agree on all
Speaker 1: of those points. So I'm just curious that when we're
Speaker 1: right now talking about the United States, what you're pointing
Speaker 1: to with the BBC, which is something we talk about
Speaker 1: a lot, is how do you make sure that the
Speaker 1: information that is linked to is verified and true?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the issue, right, I Mean. One of
Speaker 1: the weirdest things that now we're back in the pandemic,
Speaker 1: but I want to talk about it, is this idea
Speaker 1: of COVID. Right, we had this disease. It was Trump,
Speaker 1: you know, just spread disinformation. A million Americans died. There
Speaker 1: were things that were like laughably bad, Like for example,
Speaker 1: the thing I think the most about is the horse
Speaker 1: de Warmer, right, or the blood pressure medicine, right or no,
Speaker 1: it was a malaria medicine. The malaria medicine or the
Speaker 1: horse to warmer. These were two things that Trump's people
Speaker 1: said could cure COVID. Neither of them cured COVID. About
Speaker 1: a year ago, maybe not a year ago, six months ago.
Speaker 1: We had dinner with a friend who's very smart, you know,
Speaker 1: advanced degrees, but a right winger. He said he had
Speaker 1: taken horse to warmer when he had COVID. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was insane, right, Like, you're a smart person. Just
Speaker 1: we have an actual medicine that works for COVID. So
Speaker 1: I do think that there's not an agreed upon truth
Speaker 1: in America, which is insane.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And I think this is like the generational challenge that
Speaker 4: I keep pointing to when I when I think about
Speaker 4: US politics is that you know, I hope and and
Speaker 4: still believe that Trump is likely to lose in November,
Speaker 4: but I don't think that's going to break the spell
Speaker 4: and change the Republican Party right.
Speaker 3: Of trump Ism. Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 4: There's a core question that I think people don't always
Speaker 4: take head on, which is, you know, what explains the
Speaker 4: fact that forty percent of the country still likes him,
Speaker 4: and there's sort of you know, there's two main groups
Speaker 4: of arguments around this. One is that they're bad people,
Speaker 4: right because like choice, you nowhere, like you just you
Speaker 4: like the Fellon, you're racist, et cetera. Right, And that
Speaker 4: explains some of the base, like there's no question that
Speaker 4: these are people are you know, just valueless or have
Speaker 4: values that I simply don't share. But I think there's
Speaker 4: another part of it, the second camp of explanations, which
Speaker 4: is around information flows. British people don't get exposed to
Speaker 4: Fox News, and when they do see it, like when
Speaker 4: I show my classes clips of it, they think it's insane.
Speaker 4: They have never seen news that's like this, and the
Speaker 4: right wing equivalent, gb News in the UK is watched
Speaker 4: by a tiny, tiny slice of the electorate. I mean
Speaker 4: it's it's really unpopular, it's hemorrhaging money, et cetera. And
Speaker 4: if I could show, you know, one of the things
Speaker 4: I've always wanted to do is like to show Americans,
Speaker 4: like what does a BBC radio show look like in
Speaker 4: the morning, And like last week I was listening to
Speaker 4: this labor minister abs grilled about like the minutia of
Speaker 4: housing policy in their manifesto right like down to like details,
Speaker 4: and you're like, where is this in the US, Like
Speaker 4: we don't talk about the sort of nitty gritty of
Speaker 4: like what are you going to do if you govern?
Speaker 4: And I think it creates a sense of reality where
Speaker 4: it's like, Okay, there's a real problem. So I think
Speaker 4: the information pipelines are one of the biggest generational problems
Speaker 4: we have in the United States. And I think it's
Speaker 4: something where, you know, if all I did was watch
Speaker 4: Fox News twenty four to seven, you know, I think
Speaker 4: I'd be more sympathetic to Trump too, because you just
Speaker 4: get a warped sense of what's going on and you
Speaker 4: don't see all of the bad news about him. In fact,
Speaker 4: they often you know, sort of just gloss over it
Speaker 4: or don't even report it. So I, you know, I
Speaker 4: think this is the This is the big difference to
Speaker 4: me is that the BBC, which is imperfect. I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's something where it
Speaker 4: provides this sort of shared base where people say, Okay,
Speaker 4: this is what's going on in the world. Now let's
Speaker 4: debate the solutions, which is what democracy has to be.
Speaker 4: And in the US you have the debate over like
Speaker 4: what is happening, and there's two different persons. He's a reality,
Speaker 4: they're competing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's right, and I also think that
Speaker 1: I mean, now at this point, Fox News doesn't have
Speaker 1: the numbers it had in twenty sixteen, but the Fox
Speaker 1: News ethos, you know, streams and podcasts. I mean, Steve
Speaker 1: Bannon has a humongous podcast, The War Room, and Steve
Speaker 1: Bannon is not the same as Joe Rogan, but Joe
Speaker 1: Rogan is a gateway to Steve Bannon, and millions of
Speaker 1: people listen to Joe Rogan. Right, So Joe Rogan is
Speaker 1: arguably significantly more meaningful than Fox when it comes to
Speaker 1: shifting the electorate. So Rush Limbo was the biggest voter
Speaker 1: turnout driver that Republicans had.
Speaker 3: He was the get out the vote for Republicans.
Speaker 1: So if you think about it, you know, Fox Rush,
Speaker 1: Now Joe Rogan not necessarily as toxic as Rush, but
Speaker 1: certainly on a similar continuum. There is a real media
Speaker 1: complex that is devoted to pumping up Republicans, which is
Speaker 1: such a strange thing if you think about because I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess it's just an ideological love of not paying taxes, right.
Speaker 4: You're exactly right. I think the decentralization where there's all
Speaker 4: these splinter different outlets and you have, you know, all
Speaker 4: the different right wing TV stations, but also the podcast
Speaker 4: networks and so on. I mean, I think the difference
Speaker 4: though as well, is that the stuff that they're putting
Speaker 4: out is so much crazier than the fringe things that
Speaker 4: happen in Europe or the UK. I mean, you know,
Speaker 4: like Canvas Owens, who's got this big following now, I
Speaker 4: do you know that her latest, you know, thing that
Speaker 4: she's trying to pump is this insane conspiracy theory that
Speaker 4: Brigide Matt Crang is actually a man, right, and it's
Speaker 4: like it's just and it's just like you know, it's
Speaker 4: it's hateful, it's delusional, it's insane, and like in Britain,
Speaker 4: if you were to pump this stuff, you would just
Speaker 4: become a forgotten crack pot, right, I mean, it would
Speaker 4: just it would kill your audience. And even the provocateurists
Speaker 4: who like make their name in British riving politics, like
Speaker 4: they have one foot in reality and they push the limits.
Speaker 4: But the limits are so tame relative to what we're
Speaker 4: talking about. Now, And I mean I think this is
Speaker 4: the kind of stuff where, like, you know, Liz Trust,
Speaker 4: for example, went on a podcast where the host had
Speaker 4: previously made objectionable comments about women and specifically about one
Speaker 4: female MP, and Liz Trust got condemned by members for
Speaker 4: own party going on a podcast where someone had made
Speaker 4: misogynist comments. I mean the scale of sort of like
Speaker 4: what the boundaries are is so different, right because I mean,
Speaker 4: like the Republican presidential cad that has been found liable
Speaker 4: for sexual assault personally, he bragged about assaulting women, Whereas,
Speaker 4: like you know, if you have a politician who's even
Speaker 4: adjacent to someone making misogynistic comments, there's still like consequences
Speaker 4: for them politically in the UK, So this is the
Speaker 4: stuff we're living outside the US. I sort of watched
Speaker 4: these norms moving and they still exist here and the
Speaker 4: system is still really messed up. I mean, the UK
Speaker 4: is not a paragon of functioning democracy. It still has
Speaker 4: this kind of you know, reality and consequences and shame
Speaker 4: that I think have broken down and really profound and
Speaker 4: lasting ways in the US.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for coming on. This is really
Speaker 3: really interesting.
Speaker 4: That's my pleasure.
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Speaker 2: David Wallace Wells is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth
Speaker 2: and a writer at the New York Times.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to Fast Politics, David Wells.
Speaker 5: Wells, really good to be here to to talk to you.
Speaker 1: So you are one of my few favorite climate people
Speaker 1: and we're going to go way back. Well, first, I
Speaker 1: want you to talk a little bit about John Carey
Speaker 1: because that is really disturbing that John Carrey was the
Speaker 1: top climate diplomat and he feels somewhat disappointed.
Speaker 3: So can you talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 5: Well, he was basically running Joe Biden's international climate outreach
Speaker 5: for the whole first term. He is kind of a
Speaker 5: weird position, kind of climate diplomatic that never existed before.
Speaker 5: But you know, this is a brave new world we're
Speaker 5: living in, and he was leading the charge and his main,
Speaker 5: you know, focus was in trying to set up these
Speaker 5: financing deals that would allow developing countries to afford to
Speaker 5: decarbonize by building out essentially by building out wind and solar,
Speaker 5: but other stuff too, And this is something I think
Speaker 5: many people in the US really don't appreciate. Like wind
Speaker 5: in solar is now cheaper on an average basis than
Speaker 5: dirty energy just about everywhere in the world. But the
Speaker 5: cost of capital, how much it cost to borrow money
Speaker 5: to build one of these solar farms out or to
Speaker 5: build out a wind farm. The cost of capital is
Speaker 5: like four times as high in the developing world as
Speaker 5: of this in the rich world, which means that the
Speaker 5: actual expense attached to a particular renewable project is much
Speaker 5: much higher for the poor than it is for the rich.
Speaker 5: And that's for a lot of reasons, you know. But
Speaker 5: it's a huge problem that needs to be solved if
Speaker 5: we want the global South to, as they finally get
Speaker 5: onto the electric grid and bring energy to their impoverished citizens,
Speaker 5: do it in a clean rather than a dirty way.
Speaker 5: And Kerrie was trying to do that with this kind
Speaker 5: of fancy set of financial instruments called jet peas, where
Speaker 5: basically there's like a little bit of philanthropic money put
Speaker 5: out that then sort of tells the private money, it's
Speaker 5: going to be safe to invest here, Like if there's
Speaker 5: this philanthropic money here, you can actually lend these countries
Speaker 5: the money they need to build out their green energy sources.
Speaker 5: And they did it to much fanfare in a bunch
Speaker 5: of countries around the world over the last five years,
Speaker 5: and basically, in no case did it actually work out, Like,
Speaker 5: in no case did it actually deliver a large scale
Speaker 5: private investment spending spree that would allow any of the
Speaker 5: countries to dramatically change their course on emissions. And so
Speaker 5: it was, you know, on some level, like a perfect neoliberal,
Speaker 5: technocratic approach to the problem of poor countries not being
Speaker 5: able to afford the money they need to build out
Speaker 5: green energy. It seemed in theory at the whiteboard in
Speaker 5: a conference room, you know, in the McKenzie coffee clatch
Speaker 5: or whatever, it seemed like it would be a perfect
Speaker 5: solution to this problem. And it just hasn't yet worked.
Speaker 5: Maybe it'll work in the future, but it has absolutely
Speaker 5: not worked to this point, which means that his big
Speaker 5: bet has been basically a failure. As he's exiting this office,
Speaker 5: he's being replaced by Avesta. He's talking also a lot
Speaker 5: more openly about the villainy of the oil and gas
Speaker 5: companies and how much they're standing in the way, which
Speaker 5: is a whole other part of the.
Speaker 1: Saga, Which is good that he's doing that, because they
Speaker 1: fucking suck. Yeah, but not to put too fine a
Speaker 1: point on it, obviously.
Speaker 5: Yeah, No, you can't overstate they have any of the
Speaker 5: oil and gas companies. Looking in the really big picture,
Speaker 5: we're in a much better place than we were, you know,
Speaker 5: three four or five years ago. I'm climbing in terms
Speaker 5: of rolling out renewables all around the world. We keep
Speaker 5: being surprised at how fast it's going, but it's just
Speaker 5: going much much faster in the rich parts of the
Speaker 5: world than in the poor. And if we really want
Speaker 5: to salvage some whole of stabilizing the temperature at a
Speaker 5: relatively comfortable level for the future generations, we kind of
Speaker 5: need to solve that problem for the global south very fast,
Speaker 5: and we don't have a good toolkit at the moment
Speaker 5: to do so.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's hard to look at where we are on
Speaker 1: climate and not despair, but there are reasons not to despair, right.
Speaker 5: It's sort of both stories at once, Like the rollout
Speaker 5: of renewable energy is absolutely astonishing. It's much faster than
Speaker 5: almost every forecast said was even possible just a few
Speaker 5: years ago. So we're building out much more of the
Speaker 5: good stuff, much faster than anybody predicted. We're not yet
Speaker 5: drawing down the dirty stuff, and that's the problem. We
Speaker 5: can keep at wind and solar, but so long as
Speaker 5: we're continuing to burn oil and gas and coal, we're
Speaker 5: still doing more damage every year than we've ever done
Speaker 5: in the entire history of the planet. Most of the
Speaker 5: analysis says that we're about to hit a turning point there.
Speaker 5: Maybe it'll be five years from now, maybe it'll be
Speaker 5: this year, and we'll have reached a peak. I think
Speaker 5: it's kind of like, you know, I'll trust that when
Speaker 5: I see it, but it's certainly better than everybody's saying.
Speaker 5: We're nowhere near a peak. The problem is that from
Speaker 5: the peak, we have to get all the way down
Speaker 5: from the highest level of emissions ever recorded all the
Speaker 5: way down to zero, ideally in the space of just
Speaker 5: a couple of decades, and however long it takes. We
Speaker 5: need to get all the way to zero, not just
Speaker 5: halfway or recorders of the way. They're to stabilize temperatures
Speaker 5: at any level. So I think there's you know, there's
Speaker 5: a there's a hopeful story, and there's a really bleak,
Speaker 5: depressing story, and they're both kind of happening at once.
Speaker 5: And one of the reasons this, you know, climate is
Speaker 5: a little bit hard to wrap your head around, is
Speaker 5: that those are some pretty big contradictions to maintain.
Speaker 1: Yes, true, talk to me about China, and then we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about something else that makes me depressed.
Speaker 5: Kina is in certain ways a green miracle. They in
Speaker 5: the last year have installed more solar power than the
Speaker 5: entire rest of the world put together. That's inside China.
Speaker 5: They've installed sixty percent of all of the wind power
Speaker 5: that's been installed anywhere in the world. And they are
Speaker 5: absolutely commanding the entire green energy industrial production economy for
Speaker 5: the whole world, which is to say, they are literally
Speaker 5: producing five times as many solar pans in China than
Speaker 5: the entire rest of the world put together. They're producing
Speaker 5: so much battery power right now that they could doubly
Speaker 5: supply the world's demand every year. They are doing this
Speaker 5: in almost every sector. The big story over the last
Speaker 5: few months has been, you know, Joe Biden instituting a
Speaker 5: tariff on a lot of these technologies, but most kind
Speaker 5: of conspicuously on evs. On the EV's, China has come
Speaker 5: out of absolutely nowhere. Like five years ago, they were
Speaker 5: hardly producing EV's, they were not exporting any EV's, and
Speaker 5: they've since become over the last five years, the world's
Speaker 5: largest exporter of all cars, in part because of the
Speaker 5: power of electric vehicles, which they are now producing cars
Speaker 5: that can drive at ranges considerably longer than any car
Speaker 5: on the market in the United States or Europe for
Speaker 5: something like ten thousand dollars per car. And that is
Speaker 5: from a climate perspectives alone, an incredible miracle which opens
Speaker 5: up whole new possibilities for how quickly we could decarbonize transportation. Unfortunately,
Speaker 5: it also looks like a potentially mortal threat to the
Speaker 5: European and car industries, and so both of those areas
Speaker 5: are rather than you know, taking the win on climate,
Speaker 5: they're trying to go to war for their industrial sectors,
Speaker 5: which maybe they need to do, but you know it's
Speaker 5: going to come at a climate cost too, because if
Speaker 5: Americans are going to have to pay three times as
Speaker 5: much per EV and then almost anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 5: We're probably going to be buying many fewer evs than
Speaker 5: other countries.
Speaker 1: I would like to have a bright spot here. Enjoy
Speaker 1: one of the very few bright spots. Bad for Elon
Speaker 1: mosk or as I call him, Elon Marsh Right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think you know, bu Id is neck and
Speaker 5: neck in a couple of recent quarters. They've been ahead
Speaker 5: of Tesla as the world's biggest manufacturer of ev is,
Speaker 5: and I think they're destined to surpass Tesla. He just
Speaker 5: took home what was it, fifty billion dollars?
Speaker 3: Would cry, yeah, now fuck them.
Speaker 5: But you know, I think a few years ago, especially
Speaker 5: the stock price of Tesla, suggested that investors were betting
Speaker 5: that the entire global ev market would be supplied by Tesla,
Speaker 5: And now it seems vanishingly unlikely that that will be
Speaker 5: the case, in part because you know, the world full
Speaker 5: of many people who can't afford fifty thousand dollars cars,
Speaker 5: and the Chinese automakers are at the moment at least
Speaker 5: doing much much better. It's applying the cheap versions.
Speaker 1: Can you explain to us why oil companies their new
Speaker 1: thing is like this pivot to like both and yes,
Speaker 1: you need green, but you also need oil.
Speaker 3: But you really don't fucking need oil.
Speaker 1: This is just bullshit to try to keep them alive, right,
Speaker 1: you know, over.
Speaker 5: The next ten twelve years, like probably we're going to
Speaker 5: need a bunch more oil because the cars on the
Speaker 5: road are not going to be replaced immediately. Maybe that'll
Speaker 5: even stretch out to twenty years. But we expect that
Speaker 5: we've probably already passed peak global demand for oil. So
Speaker 5: the demand is going to decrease over the next few decades,
Speaker 5: but it won't be zero anytime soon, because like someone
Speaker 5: who bought a car two years ago is still going
Speaker 5: to be driving it ten years from now.
Speaker 3: But it's going to be a lot lower.
Speaker 5: It depends on the country, yeah, I mean certain countries
Speaker 5: are going to turn over their their fleet very quickly,
Speaker 5: and I think the US is probably going to be
Speaker 5: you know, probably fifteen or twenty years even until the
Speaker 5: vast majority or but we're heading in that direction. You know.
Speaker 5: The argument for coal and gas are a little bit different.
Speaker 5: You know, coal I basically think is not economical anywhere
Speaker 5: and really is heading for a pretty rapid phase out.
Speaker 1: I mean that was true even ten years ago. It's
Speaker 1: just so expensive all right.
Speaker 5: People have different views about gas, as you know, in
Speaker 5: terms of electricity generation and stabilizing the grid. Personally, I
Speaker 5: think there are a lot of new technologies coming on
Speaker 5: that will allow wind and solar to be much more
Speaker 5: reliable than they have been in the past. Battery storage
Speaker 5: is getting a lot better, We're going to be doing
Speaker 5: a lot with geo thermal. The US is actually making
Speaker 5: a huge investment in nuclear. All of these things are
Speaker 5: going to be able to provide what's called the baseload dower,
Speaker 5: onto which we could stack the kind of intermitt and
Speaker 5: relatively less reliable wind and solar stuff and get all
Speaker 5: the way to our energy needs. So I personally, I
Speaker 5: don't think there's much need for ad natural gas, but
Speaker 5: there's still some dispute over that. The answer to your
Speaker 5: big question that why do oil companies exist is because
Speaker 5: oil is insanely profitable.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: A few years ago, I remember I was on a
Speaker 5: panel with an energy economist who is like, you look
Speaker 5: at a barrel of oil, it's like eighty to ninety
Speaker 5: percent profit. Still roughly the case today. These are companies that,
Speaker 5: even in a moment of systemic decline, as people are
Speaker 5: turning away from their product. They are literally producing record
Speaker 5: profits year after year after year. This has been a
Speaker 5: few straight years of record profits. I don't think that's
Speaker 5: going to last for fifty years. I hope it doesn't
Speaker 5: last for thirty years. But these are not that are
Speaker 5: making decisions on thirty year horizons to making decisions up
Speaker 5: one to five year horizons, and on that horizon it
Speaker 5: remains an incredibly lucrative business. There was a book that
Speaker 5: came out about six months ago arguing that we've wrongly
Speaker 5: focused in thinking about climate in general, on the price
Speaker 5: of renewables, which are now really low, rather than the
Speaker 5: question of profit, and renewables are not generating nearly as
Speaker 5: much profit than oil, And if you switch your lens
Speaker 5: from thinking about price, where renewables have already basically won,
Speaker 5: to thinking about profit, it puts you in a space
Speaker 5: of really worrying about just how quickly this transition will
Speaker 5: happen and how desperately the oil and gas businesses will
Speaker 5: fight to keep it from going going forward as fast
Speaker 5: as it otherwise should.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I hate for them to have a tough time.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that Trump promised them, which
Speaker 1: I think is really relevant and is very trumpy is
Speaker 1: He said, if you support me, I will make it
Speaker 1: so there'll be no regulation and you can just fucking
Speaker 1: rape the earth as much as you want. Not to
Speaker 1: put too fine a point on it.
Speaker 5: It was one of the more naked quid pro quo
Speaker 5: offers in American political history. He said, a room of
Speaker 5: assembled oil and gas people, if you raise me a
Speaker 5: billion dollars, I will write you a blank check in return.
Speaker 5: And whoever was in that room, and whatever the size
Speaker 5: of the price tag you gave. That is an ugly,
Speaker 5: ugly political gesture that almost every politician anywhere in America
Speaker 5: at any other point in history would have known better
Speaker 5: than to say, oh loud. But Trump obviously did not.
Speaker 5: Now exactly what he's capable of doing in a second
Speaker 5: term year. I think is it's a complicated and interesting
Speaker 5: question because so much of the IRA money and so
Speaker 5: much private money chasing those tax incentives is going into
Speaker 5: red districts, and to some large degree, red states, which
Speaker 5: are often now actually America's clean energy leaders. You know,
Speaker 5: North Dakota I think has the highest renewable electricity anywhere
Speaker 5: in the country. Texas is just building out wind and
Speaker 5: solar like Gangbusters, and In fact, last year there was
Speaker 5: an effort in that to try to decap that process
Speaker 5: in Texas, and it failed because some Republicans said to
Speaker 5: some other Republicans, hang on, we don't want to like
Speaker 5: actually raise the electricity bills of our customers and make
Speaker 5: it give put them at higher risk of blackouts just
Speaker 5: for the sake of the oil and gas business. If
Speaker 5: renewables are going to be helping us and helping our
Speaker 5: citizens and our voters, let's not stand in the way.
Speaker 5: And that is from a market perspective, the state of
Speaker 5: play generally, like, if we do not interfere in this market,
Speaker 5: renewables will win. They may not win quite as fast
Speaker 5: as I might like, but they are going to win.
Speaker 5: It is actually the oil and gas business which is
Speaker 5: demanding interventions to prevent process. And that is you know,
Speaker 5: that means that it's not just Trump withdrawing environmental protections
Speaker 5: that that's going to let loose an oil and gas bonanza.
Speaker 5: Primary He'll be slow walking stuff that would help the
Speaker 5: green stuff proceed. So that means not doing anything about permitting,
Speaker 5: not doing anything about all of the local opposition to
Speaker 5: renewable energy, and just sort of letting that stand as
Speaker 5: a serious obstacle to new build out, and probably it
Speaker 5: means that the US in a second Trump term, given
Speaker 5: a second Trump term, would be decarbonizing considerably less fast
Speaker 5: than they would second Biden term. But I actually think that,
Speaker 5: you know, the market forces are considerably more powerful than
Speaker 5: a sort of crude political partisan logic would make you think.
Speaker 5: I think that, you know, America is, like everywhere else
Speaker 5: in the world, is heading towards clean energy. The question
Speaker 5: is not if it's just when you know, the best
Speaker 5: thing that Trump could do for oil and gas is
Speaker 5: not to stop that revolution, it's just to slow it.
Speaker 5: And exactly how capable he is about given how capable
Speaker 5: he is doing anything, is you know, a huge open question.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm not going to take that to the bank,
Speaker 1: because that fucking guy, he's got smart people trying to
Speaker 1: explain to him how to do stuff now in a
Speaker 1: way that he didn't before.
Speaker 5: The Heritage Foundation Project twenty twenty five stuff really ugly
Speaker 5: and scary on climate. It's really ugly and scary in
Speaker 5: every category. But the question is whether that will actually
Speaker 5: be the playbook that is put into place, or whether
Speaker 5: Trump governs a lot more like you did in the
Speaker 5: first term, you know, running around as a desperate, resentful
Speaker 5: score settler. You know, my guess is it's some mix
Speaker 5: of both. Even as I think you're wise to say
Speaker 5: I'm not going to take my David Well as well
Speaker 5: as those reassurances to the bank, I also wouldn't take
Speaker 5: the Project twenty twenty five playbook to the bank as
Speaker 5: a guarantee.
Speaker 1: What I think the top line on the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five stuff is that the Heritage Foundation has been taken
Speaker 1: over by complete lunatics.
Speaker 5: Well, the whole party has, really Yeah.
Speaker 1: But the Heritage used to be like the last fashion
Speaker 1: of normal in that party, and that is no more
Speaker 1: the case.
Speaker 5: Of the future we're staring down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, would you talk for a minute about like, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of people who listen to this podcast
Speaker 1: who just would like to have some sort of concrete
Speaker 1: stuff they should be doing when it comes to climate.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, honestly, heading into an election season, I
Speaker 5: think voting and campaigning is the most important thing that
Speaker 5: we can do in America at an individual level. If
Speaker 5: you want to shrink your carbon footprint, if you want
Speaker 5: to live within your values and think of yourself as
Speaker 5: a climate person who is doing right by the future
Speaker 5: of the planet. The main things that you can do
Speaker 5: to reduce your carbon footprint are fly commercial, I mean
Speaker 5: I'm not fly honestly, not fly fly yeah, not fly
Speaker 5: driving ev if you can, and not eat red meat.
Speaker 5: And those are really like by far the biggest contributors
Speaker 5: to the carbon footprints of most relatively well off Americans.
Speaker 5: You can also do carbon offsets for your fly to
Speaker 5: some extent for your cars too, but they're pretty unreliable.
Speaker 5: So like, I do them when I fly, but I
Speaker 5: also know that like they don't actually cover my.
Speaker 3: Guilt, but they make you feel a little better, a.
Speaker 5: Little bit better. And there are bees and worst ones
Speaker 5: that you know you can you can get into the
Speaker 5: research on that as much as you like or not
Speaker 5: as much as you like. These days, you in most
Speaker 5: airlines do have like a little button when you're checking
Speaker 5: out that say if you know, if you'd like to
Speaker 5: offset the carbon cost of this, click here, But most
Speaker 5: of those are pretty unreliable. That's a bit like if
Speaker 5: you're worrying about what you're doing, the things that you
Speaker 5: can that you should focus on our air travel, internal
Speaker 5: combustion engine vehicle driving, and red meat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and also not drinking bottled water right or now?
Speaker 1: Is that a rounding era?
Speaker 3: I don't know. Tell me I need to now.
Speaker 5: You know, I've gotten considerably more worried about plastic pollution
Speaker 5: over the last couple of years. When I when I
Speaker 5: wrote my book five years ago or so, I actually
Speaker 5: had a few lines in there that called it just
Speaker 5: like a red herring and a distraction. But it's become
Speaker 5: much more central to the way that I think about
Speaker 5: how we're despoiling the planet. We now see microplastics in
Speaker 5: freshly fallen Arctic snow. We found them in the deepest
Speaker 5: depths of the Mariana Trench, in you know, the deepest
Speaker 5: parts of the ocean. They actually got there before human
Speaker 5: explorers got there. We find them in you know, in
Speaker 5: mother's milk, on the inside of placentas, in sperm, in testicles.
Speaker 5: It's like everywhere. If you cut open your arm, there
Speaker 5: would be lots of microplastics there.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 5: I know, you know, we don't know exactly what they're
Speaker 5: doing to us. I think, you know, the fact that
Speaker 5: we're not all immediately dropping answer suggests that, you know,
Speaker 5: it's not like an apocalyptic, you know, extinction kind of event.
Speaker 5: But it is also quite strange to take seriously the
Speaker 5: idea that none of us, anywhere on the planet are
Speaker 5: avoiding this kind of contamination. It's pretty mind bending to
Speaker 5: try to reckon with what it means for our sense
Speaker 5: of autonomy that we are all of us passing through
Speaker 5: a contagion field of pollution, navigating our way through that,
Speaker 5: thinking we are in control of our lives, but actually
Speaker 5: having many aspects of our health, cognitive performance, you know,
Speaker 5: economic well being determined by these forces of pollution which
Speaker 5: are well beyond our individual control. And I worry a
Speaker 5: lot about, you know, the contribution of plastics to that problem.
Speaker 5: We'll see the next five or ten years. I think
Speaker 5: you're going to tell us a lot in the science,
Speaker 5: but at the moment, I would just say I would
Speaker 5: rather be living on a planet where every single living
Speaker 5: being was not already contaminated by microplastics than the one
Speaker 5: in which when we're living on now, where every one
Speaker 5: of us is, you know, to our core, already a
Speaker 5: kind of a hybrid being human and pollution of the
Speaker 5: same time.
Speaker 1: Our human evolution at the same time. Thank you, David Wallace.
Speaker 5: Well, thank you.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
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